HEXEMBER: Chronal Wastes

Here's a quick recap: Hexember is a series of semi-daily blogposts where I detail a hex and its points of interest, tailored for OSR hexcrawls (but compatible with most games). If you need a simple procedure for exploring hexes, I included one in the first entry!

CHRONAL WASTES

✦ At first glance

A magical catastrophe has befallen these lands, causing the landscape to constantly flicker between different eras, ranging from an Ice Age, a post-industrial, nightmarish wasteland or a barren battlefield filled with trenches and corpses. Sometimes, it stays in an era for hours. Other times, it changes several times in the span of a minute. The only predictable things about the Chronal Wastes are its unpredictability, and the fact that any living things trapped in its many eras normally can't interact with travelers, for they are stuck in an unbreakable loop.

1-2. The Disaster

The vast majority of the Chronal Wastes is comprised by an area known simply as the Disaster. For every hour spent in this area, roll a d20.

• 1-5, the wastes manifest as idyllic fields of prismatic flowers, constantly changing shapes and colors. Those flowers can be picked and sold, though they'll become normal flowers in d4 days. Herbalists, druids and mages will pay at least 20 copper coins per flower. 
• 6-12, the wastes are undergoing an Ice Age. Unless they are appropriately dressed for the freezing cold, the party will suffer d6 damage for every hour spent braving the elements.
• 13-16, a time-storm will be raging through the area, violently mixing traits from every conceivable era and preventing any progress from being made in a journey until it settles. When a traveler survives a time-storm, they emerge a few years younger or older from it. Roll 3d6: the first determines whether a character becomes younger (odds) or older (evens), the second determines how many years they gain or lose, and the third determines how many days it takes for them to get back to normal.
• 17-19, the party finds itself in the middle of every war that's ever been or ever will be fought in these lands. Although the combatants will usually ignore them, the party has a 2-in-6 chance of being perceived as enemies by a squad of d8+2 soldiers wearing elegant uniforms and carrying 18th century firearms. If the characters fight and defeat those soldiers, they can keep the firearms and enough ammo for three encounters.
  
• 20, roll 2d20 and combine the results.
  

3. The Royal Academy of Chronomancy

The very source of the Chronal Wastes and the former authority on time magic, the Royal Academy of Chronomancy fell victim to its own hubris. Whatever caused the Disaster, it's too late to fix it, but the Academy may still offer knowledge for those willing to risk repeating their mistakes. When the party visits the Academy, roll a d6 to determine the state they find it in:

• 1-2, the Academy has yet to be built, and all the party finds are its foundations, rich in chronal energy. A sufficiently powerful mage will be capable of detecting these energies, which can be used to immediately replenish all of their spells and any spent scrolls.
  
• 3-5, the party finds the Academy in the middle of the incident that brought its downfall. Students are disintegrating and the walls are rapidly crumbling, while professors are valiantly yet uselessly trying to counteract what triggered the disaster. The party can try to uncover the mystery behind this catastrophe, but they've arrived too late to find much more than the following clues: the fuming, blindingly white shell of a divine egg, a professor exclaiming that "the divine one is free", and another pleading for everyone not to hurt it, because "it's just a child, it doesn't know what it's doing".
• 6, visiting the Royal Academy of Chronomancy in its heyday is a rare privilege, even if it's eerily empty. The student body, the faculty and the staff are mere after-images, incapable of seeing the party or interacting with them, and busily living out their daily lives with not a care in the world. The Academy is flourishing in every way, its ivory walls standing tall. Though nothing can be taken from here without disappearing, the Library of Eons still offers the world's largest selection of books, some of which haven't even been written yet. Alas, the party can't stay here forever, and the Academy will shift to another era in d4 hours.

4. The Cave of Epochs

Scintillating with the promise of safety, the Cave of Epochs offers a refuge from the chaos outside, yet it was here that most chronomancers mined one of the most valuable resources of their craft: the omen stones. When a character gazes deep into the cave's glittering walls, they have a 2-in-6 chance of finding an men Stone and experiencing an omen. Roll a d4 to determine which kind of omen they receive.

• 1-2, they sense that someone they trust will betray them in the future.
  
• 3, they get a glimpse of an impending (yet preventable) disaster.
  
• 4, they don't see anything, but what does that say about their future?
  

These omens would be more aptly described as intuitive feelings than precise visions, but they are rarely wrong. The GM is free to plan a way to incorporate them in a future session or to ignore them completely. Rarely doesn't mean never, after all.

 

Omen stones can be mined, and weapons infused with them have an infamous ability: anything hit by one will age d6 years. After rolling a 1, the weapon will lose its charge, but it can be restored by bringing it to the Chronal Wastes. Most merchants won't pay anything for an omen stone out of superstition, but a crazy, ambitious or driven blacksmith may be willing to craft something with one.

 

INSPIRATIONS

The concept for the Chronal Wastes came from a Twitter thread I wrote last year, back when I was experimenting with using MtG cards as oracles. The execution, however, owes a lot to the film Synchronic (by Benson and Moorhead, two of my favorite directors) and the comic DIE, by Kieron Gillen and Stephanie Hans. Can't say much more than that, though, lest we head into spoiler territory!